morphony was premiered in August 2018 at the ICMC (International Computer Music Conference) in Daegu, South Korea.
morphony is largely based on the same structures and algorithms as my piece Eutropia for piano, percussion, electronics and interactive projection.
screen recording of a performance:
In the early 1950s the British mathematician and computer science pioneer Alan Turing also worked on problems of theoretical biology. In his paper "The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis" he described principles for the spontaneous evolution of patterns, like stripes, spots, spirals or waves, from a nearly homogeneous mixture of substances in cells. This was one of the earliest computational models for the generation of structures like the well-known patterns on animals skins or the arrangement of leaves on a plant stem.
At the same time the Russian biochemist Boris Belousov accidentally discovered, without knowing Turing's work, a chemical oscillation, which appeared as periodical color changes in a homogeneous mixture of several substances. Belousov couldn't publish a paper about his findings because at that time most experts didn't consider such chemical oscillations possible. Only 10 years later his experiments were recapitulated and extended by the young physicist Anatol Zhabotinsky. His studies now attracted much more interest and finally the so-called reaction-diffusion systems became part of the broad field of interdisciplinary research on non-equilibrium systems where the evolution of structures in living and non-living nature is investigated by system-theoretical means.
For this piece I'm using the softwares SuperCollider and openFrameworks / OpenGL for sound- and video synthesis in realtime within an interactive reaction-diffusion system. The parameters of this RD system, like variable mixing ratios, varying reaction speeds or petri-dishes of different sizes, are changed and finetuned automatically or manually in real-time via MIDI controllers and a tablet (OSC) in order to produce a wide range of sounding and visual outcomes: stable or unstable system states, patterns, textures, shapes and standing or moving waves, spirals etc. But there are also interactions between visuals and sound and even audio-visual feedback loops.